“You’d do that to me, would you?” said he at last.
“Without another thought,” said I. “Do you accept my terms?”
Saying nothing, he went down on his hands and knees right there in Bond Street at the doorstep of the shop of Joseph Griffin, gunsmith; and there, as a crowd gathered, he opened the case, took from it one of the pistols, and handed it up to me. I pocketed it. The crowd, behaving as crowds will, laughed at what they had seen. Muttering and buzzing about it, they began to drift away. I offered Mr. Deuteronomy a hand up. He was slow to accept it.
“ ’ Twas not my intention to shame you,” said I. “Simply to show you that I was serious in the matter.” Yet that, too, was said in a tone of seriousness that may have sounded cold to any listener.
Nevertheless, he took my hand, and I helped him to his feet.
“You made your point,” he replied.
“I’ve a question for you. Since I’m trusting you with court materials, I must know where you live.”
“In the Haymarket,” said he, “just above the coffee house.”
No wonder he had arrived there so quickly!
“And another,” said I. “What are your plans regarding the Newmarket race next Sunday?”
“Ah, you heard about that, did you? Well, I’ll be there to ride Pegasus, and we’ll win-damn me if we don’t!” He hesitated, then blurted out. “And you can tell your Sir John another thing. Tell him that I expect to find my sister there.”
That did little more than confuse me. How would he find her so far away? And why should he find her in Newmarket, of all places?
“Explain that, if you please,” said I.
“And if I don’t?”
“Do it anyway.”
He came close and lowered his voice. “Once, whilst in her cups, she told me that she had met Maggie’s father in Newmarket at the races. Maybe she thinks she’ll find him there again. Maybe she already has.”
With that, he wheeled about and bolted off in the direction of the Haymarket. In a sense, he seemed to be daring me to catch him if I could. I did not accept his challenge, but turned and started back to Bow Street. I had much to tell Sir John, as I well knew. I was certain, too, that he would be most interested in that last bit of intelligence that Mr. Plummer had given us.
So much had happened through the morning that I thought the day near done by the time I reached Bow Street. There was no telling from the gray sky above just what time it might be; I had not seen the sun the whole day through. Yet as I approached Number 4, I heard a commingling of sounds that told me that it was not near so late in the afternoon as I had supposed. There was, first of all, the rumble of many voices together, and then a beating of wood upon wood and one loud, low voice (unmistakably that of Sir John) that stilled the rest. It could not be much after one o’clock. Then came the sound of another voice-high, sharp, and hectoring in tone. Good God! It was Clarissa! What had been threatened once or twice had come to pass. When I was unavailable to take the place of Mr. Marsden, Sir John found that Clarissa had not as yet left for the Magdalene Home, and so did draft her for duty as his clerk. She, of course, would have been delighted. I wondered how she had done-and managed to wonder it without feeling that sense of anxiety that heretofore had always come in those situations in which I imagined us in competition, each with the other. I no longer supposed that, though just what our true relationship might be, I would have been at a loss to say. Engaged to be engaged? What, in all truth, could that mean?
I slipped into the last row of the courtroom, attracting no notice at all. If I were recognized, it would only have been by those whores and layabouts who saw me doing the day’s buying in Covent Garden. I had become as one easily passed over by then, unnoticed in the background. That pleased me somehow, though I should be at a loss to explain why it did.
The case before Sir John was one of those disputes between merchants in Covent Garden that he was known to settle so evenhandedly. The disputants were a man and a woman, as more often than not was the way of it. The man had a choice plot just at the entrance to the Garden through Russell Street, and he meant to hold on to it-in spite of the challenge put to him by the woman. (A Mrs. Penney, as I recall.) It seems that she approached the vendor (whose name I cannot now for the life of me remember), and offered to buy the space from him. Her offer of cash suited him, and he gave his consent orally. She presented him with a bill of sale that her solicitor had drawn up and asked him to sign. Reading the document carefully, he saw that there was no provision for him to have a space from which to sell his fruits; he had assumed they would trade spaces, and he, having the more desirable one, would get the cash amount in addition. By no means, said she. A place for him to sell his goods had not been under discussion. What he did after selling his place to her was up to him, but he had agreed to sell, she said, and now he must do that. He refused, and hence the two disputants wound up in magistrate’s court before Sir John Fielding.
Sir John asked a few questions in order to get some feeling for the two disputants. She, needless to say, was the more aggressive of the two. Her plan, it seemed, was to sell raw produce from both locations. When it came time to interrogate the second disputant, Sir John asked the man if he contested any of the facts that Mrs. Penney had presented; he did not. He asked him then how he had come by the plot in question, and was told that it had been in his family for years. How many years? Fifty, at least-his grandfather had bought it from a widower without children. And why had the greengrocer agreed to sell it now? Sickness in the family, said he. At that, Sir John nodded and asked to have the bill of sale that was in contention. Mrs. Penney handed it up to Clarissa, who, at Sir John’s request, read it carefully.
To her, he said, “It is just as has been presented?”
“It is, Sir John.”
“Then give it me, please.”
She complied, and the magistrate took the bill of sale and ripped it into as many pieces as was convenient.
“There,” said he, “that is what your bill of sale is worth, Mrs. Penney. You may have another made up, which includes a trade of the two properties as well as a sum of money, for his property is unquestionably more valuable than your own.”
His decision threw the courtroom into mutters and mumbles. There came male laughter and strident female objections. All was in turmoil until one voice broke through and dominated all the rest.
“I do not think that altogether fair, Sir John. After all, a solicitor’s time costs money, does it not? Could the original bill of sale not have been amended to include those stipulations you demand? Of course it could. Yet now-now of course it could not. And another thing. .”
That voice, reader, you many suppose was that of a dissatisfied Mrs. Penney. Nevertheless, if you supposed such, then you would be wrong, for it was none other than our Clarissa who spoke out so boldly against Sir John.
Even I, who knew her so well, was surprised at this intemperate outburst. Yet if I was surprised, the rest in the courtroom were quite stunned. All of a sudden, a pall of silence fell over the seated crowd. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Oh, they themselves had often misbehaved-indeed they had done so just now-like children in school. Occasionally, though very rarely, one of their number was so rowdy that he (or she) would be expelled from the courtroom, but the usual thing was simply to quiet down when Sir John banged with his gavel and called for order. All this, certainly-but never, never anything like what all had just witnessed: criticism of the magistrate by the very clerk who sat beside him. This was outright rebellion and must be put down. But how? Not only had the crowd fallen quite still, but also those in my row shifted forward in their seats and seemed to hold their breath. I felt it was done so in every row and corner of the place.